In addition to my point about clarifying the decision criteria in proposed section 63, the bottom line I discussed, which is absolutely critical, I would also underline something I didn't get a chance to mention, which is the importance of the central role played by regional and strategic assessments.
There is a huge amount of promise in this bill that, for the first time, we may get regional assessments that look at landscape issues and strategic assessments that consider policy issues in a way that can provide guidance to project-level assessments so that they don't get bogged down with those issues.
The problem, or the gap, is that it is not clear from the language of the act that those assessments will actually proceed, because once again they are left to discretion. A helpful amendment would be to have the expert committee contemplated in the bill recommend a list of regional and strategic assessments that ought to occur and to have the minister respond to that, or even better, to schedule those regional and strategic assessments in the bill such that they stay on the radar and don't fall off it if, for instance, there's a change of government. That's the critical piece.